So whats FFXIV beta like?

For those of you having problems using the FFXIV Downloader...

1. Start the SE patcher
2. Stop the SE patcher once it gets going (to create the torrent files)
3. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\My Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV Beta Version\downloads\ffxiv-beta\d96437e6\metainfo
- This is on XP, it'll be slightly different for Vista/7.
4. Use a Bittorrent program to download every patch in this folder (or whatever you don't have, if you're updating). This should be considerably faster than the SE patcher.
5. When completed, put the files in C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\My Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV Beta Version\downloads\ffxiv-beta\d96437e6\patch
6. Go ahead and overwrite the files the patcher had already started on.
7. Again, it'll be slightly different for Vista/7
8. Run the SE patcher again, and it will verify/install the updates
9. Done.
Click to expand...

Taken from here.

This does in fact work, and I do it for every patch.
 
Yep, using a regular Torrent program is a billion times faster. Their client software is terrible.
 
I crafted some stuff and after I finished the quest it says I gained the recipe. How do I look at my recipes, or do I have to keep track of the ingredients myself?
Also, does increasing any stats boost your craftmanship?
 
masamune said:
I crafted some stuff and after I finished the quest it says I gained the recipe. How do I look at my recipes, or do I have to keep track of the ingredients myself?
Also, does increasing any stats boost your craftmanship?
Click to expand...
you dont, you do, and most likely

this is a like FFXI dont expect it hold your hand AT ALL
also the combat is just bad
i really wanted to like 14 but wow every thing is so so broken
 
But whats FFXIV like well its like this
I feel like I'm at the doorway of a burning building, trying to get out, even as others, oblivious to the danger, are crowding around the entrance trying to get in. I've just spent a few days playing FFXIV and it's been pretty miserable.

As a former Final Fantasy XI player, I was hoping XIV would be worth a try, or at the very least, fun for my harder-core friends. But I can't see the game working very long at all the way I saw it. I would, in fact, call FFXI the superior game in every way.

Ironically, even though I was admittedly lukewarm about it, I got into the open beta before most of my more devoted friends, even many of the closed beta testers (who had to reapply for the open beta).

Even after struggling through the choked application process, I find that most of the tester materials, including almost all the documentation and worse yet, the bug reporting system, are off-limits to open beta testers. That's when alarm bells went off. I knew that this test is for pretty much one thing and one thing only: stress-testing the servers. They might fix a bug here and there, but they are not interested in further bug reports and they are not interested in us playing effectively or directedly. The game is, for most intents and purposes, the one they intend to ship.

And believe me, I found plenty of bugs that could use reporting. When the client wasn't crashing, or I wasn't being disconnected, there were any number of flaws that suggested a rushed and haphazard development process, and many other design decisions that make it difficult to play at all.

I won't rehash the complaints people have made about the fatigue system. I'll just say that I believe they're probably short on content and that's why they've implemented these limitations. It has little to do with being casual-friendly. It's nothing new, either. FFXI has what are known as the "genkai" quests, artificial level caps that require difficult quests to be completed before you can unlock the next few levels. These were originally made to slow progress when FFXI shipped with incomplete content, but were left in after the fact, creating a bizarre series of hurdles halfway through the level progression. Anyhow, my main complaint isn't about the fatigue system, but it is related...

The number one decision they made that seems to destroy playability is to make the timed quests known as guildleves fail instantly if the client crashes or you become disconnected. That, coupled with the decision to limit the number you can do in any 48-hour period (to eight, I believe), means you can fail every single quest due to factors beyond your control and end up waiting two days to reattempt them. This is such an insane limitation, it trumps any other disagreement I might have had with them on any other progress limitation they made. Guildleve quests also fail without warning if you go beyond some unspecified distance from the target (which I swore was necessary to reach one of them once, as their locations are randomly generated and can appear on some pretty far-flung portions of the map which are difficult to access). Additionally, if you have partied with additional players and upped the selected difficulty for a quest for higher rewards, then if one or more of you disconnects, they lose the quest, and the remaining players are stuck with the higher difficulty quest and the disconnected players appear to be actually prohibited from cooperating.

The lag is pretty atrocious. I've never seen a game this bad aside from Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, in its original "MMO" form. I've been in MMO stress tests of all sorts, but the FFXIV platform seems woefully underoptimized. There seemed to be a fairly low number of players on the server, by MMO standards, my ping was actually fairly low, and yet the server was virtually unresponsive, made worse by an interface that clearly transmitted more than necessary to the server side. Yes, I know that lag I experience during the stress test does not necessarily reflect lag I might experience during retail, but unless they can beef up the hardware quickly, I can't see any server supporting more than 250 players (split across three cities, even) for even halfway tolerable lag.

Never mind that it took 26 seconds between starting a quest and it becoming active in my log. Never mind that, after fighting a mob, I stood there for 12 seconds being told that it was dead, before it finally got in one last attack and died. Never mind that it took 74 seconds of a loading screen between character creation and the opening cutscene. Never mind that vendor inventory windows took 8 seconds to open. The really insane one is that it took ten seconds to place a new ability on my action bar. Something which, by most rights, should be a client-side decision...or maybe one with a simple veto from the server if it's truly an invalid action.

And my complaints about lag are not so much about the lag but about lag-proof UI design. There are many things one can do in high latency situations to reassure the player, and FFXIV does none of them. There is very little indication if an action has been queued, accepted, or if you successfully issued the command at all. In fact, it often does the wrong thing. Interface feedback is strangely broken. For example, if you issue a command bound to the 1 key, then change your mind and begin hammering the 2 key for a different ability, each time you press the 2 key, the action bound to the 1 key flashes again, as if you had pressed the 1 key. And when the UI does respond with a color change to the stamina gauge for example, it does so seemingly belatedly. I took more damage and waited far longer between attacks if I waited for UI confirmation than if I just hammered the action keys over and over, ignoring the errors if I hit it too soon.

The interface is clearly meant for a game controller, as FFXI was. Intuitive actions that a PC user might expect like dragging or clicking buttons are out of the question because of the cross-platform focus. So everything is an exercise in navigating nested menus, which causes any given action to take several times as long to make.

Even before the game started, Square-Enix's lack of programming sense appalled me. Apparently FFXIV for the PS3 is delayed because developing for the PS3 is hard, but they're apparently no good at Windows development either. Their downloader/updater is based on BitTorrent, which I approve of. It's a far better method than the one FFXI was forced to use. But-- the updater is so broken, it uses ridiculous amounts of CPU, even when minimized, due to not being frame-limited, even though all it does is display a progress bar and a cursor while it plays some music. On top of being a CPU hog, it neglects to service system messages often enough, and so every 5 seconds, it freezes for several more seconds as Windows marks it as "not responding". Should you manage to start downloading a patch, it'll be difficult to do anything else, since in addition to using huge amounts of unnecessary CPU, it has no setting to limit the amount of upstream it uses to seed with. Plus, when the download reaches 90-some percent, it'll stop intentionally to extend your seeding time. At peak times, this trick might benefit the system. But it appears that it does so even if there is nobody else who needs a part. I've watched it sitting there for 10 minutes, waiting to grab the last segment, with zero peers downloading from me (nope, it's not my firewall, on larger patches during peak times, I've gotten plenty of peers).

(Edit: Since I wrote the below paragraph, they've fixed the settings application. Now, however, if you choose full screen and later attempt to Alt-Tab from within the game, it forces a disconnect from the game...just as the original FFXI application did.)

The game has no option to configure resolution or choose full-screen vs. windowed mode. In fact, the application that seems like it would do that (separate from the main game, it should be mentioned, a clear sign of console-itis) simply displays an error message in Japanese. Then again, this is the same company that, for years, denied that PC players of FFXI should have the ability to run the game in a window or use Alt-Tab. Square-Enix seems not to understand the PC. But then, if they don't understand the PC, what do they understand? Because, upon hearing that the PS3 version of FFXIV was delayed, I had to look back to see what successes they'd had on consoles lately. And I couldn't believe it. It's probably been six years since they got their hands on a PS3 devkit, and their first and only internally developed, successfully released game for the platform was Final Fantasy XIII? Everything else was merely published by them. But maybe that's a problem with the PS3. I've heard plenty of other developers complain that it's challenging to develop for. Let's see how they fared on the Xbox 360...wait, their only successful releases have been FFXIII and The Last Remnant. And The Last Remnant was famously panned for horrible frame-rates and pop-in.

Some people have told me to be patient. They've suggested that the problems I've encountered are something particular to beta or are easily fixed. Have patience, the true fans urge. But I think something far more fundamental than FFXIV is broken: Square-Enix themselves. This is what a company looks like after a massive flight of talent from the company. It is very easy to get the sense that the programmers there are quite simply in over their heads when it comes to modern consoles and modern computers. It's even more obvious when you listen to ill-advised remarks their developers have been quoted making, such as that FFXIII lacked cities because they were unable to do them justice on modern systems (certainly didn't seem to stop their competitors), or that an FFVII remake would take more than a decade to make. This is a company full of people who are making excuses for their own technical inadequacy. The only people who are still making acclaimed quality games there, it seems, are their portable platform developers. Which is interesting. Perhaps SE's salvation lies with that group. In the meantime, I see SE's acquisition of Eidos as nothing more than a smokescreen, a way of covering up their shame by slapping their names on the products of a company that still seems more than capable of making games for modern consoles.

So, this has turned into a long rant against Square-Enix, and a comments thread on The Escapist seems an odd venue to air such a thing on. But I sincerely believe that, between the technical problems FFXIV has, the internal problems Square-Enix has, and the poor PR skills they've shown in the recent past both surrounding FFXIV and in general, that this game is headed for a bad end, and may end up being another Asheron's Call 2, a game that actually fails before its predecessor.
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Just a note.^.you configure your video settings from withing the program files on your pc..not from within the game.

And a question. Does anyone understand the "timer" on the crafting menu?...exactly what does it mean if you fire off
your crafting at the beginning, middle or end of the timer session?
 
Elios said:
i really wanted to like 14 but wow every thing is so so broken
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It's called beta for a reason?

Edit since people didn't catch the joke: Beta phase 5 starts Sept. 22.
 
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harsaphes said:
Just a note.^.you configure your video settings from withing the program files on your pc..not from within the game.

And a question. Does anyone understand the "timer" on the crafting menu?...exactly what does it mean if you fire off
your crafting at the beginning, middle or end of the timer session?
Click to expand...
I suspect that once you start using those elemental crystals in crafting the timer will come into play.
I've read on some sites that there's elemental stability, and if the "Durability" number is flashing, it means the element is unstable, so you should wait for it to settle down before taking an action.
 
sayu said:
It's called beta for a reason?
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I laugh at those everytime i read them. It's less than a month from release. It's not gonna be much better at release. It's the same with every MMORPG. You guys always say "dude, it's beta" and then the game releases and it's the SAME SHIT as in beta.
 
sayu said:
It's called beta for a reason?
Click to expand...
Even though it is beta, it's scheduled to come out at the end of the month.
There are major issues that need fixing and there's not a lot of time.

It's many little things that don't inspire confidence that they'll release a quality product.
From the shoddy bittorrent client, the alt-tab crashing, the separate program for config.

If they release it, I think first impressions are going to kill them. They can't afford that when cataclysm is around the corner.
 
sayu said:
It's called beta for a reason?
Click to expand...

You do realize the game is going live for collector's edition players on the 22nd which is just over 2 weeks away. Pretty much what you see now is what you're going to get.
 
masamune said:
I suspect that once you start using those elemental crystals in crafting the timer will come into play.
I've read on some sites that there's elemental stability, and if the "Durability" number is flashing, it means the element is unstable, so you should wait for it to settle down before taking an action.
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Actually what I said is probably wrong. I think it's that glowing orb that is how unstable it is. It was shooting sparks everywhere so I tried waiting 3 times in a row and nothing changed so I don't know how it works.

Also, I found out that the quests are daily. Kinda sucks you can only spend like 5 minutes and you're stuck until the next day. I tried alchemy and there's nothing I can make without the quests since I can't get elemental shards.
 
@all the people who replied to my comment: notice the question mark at the end.
 
sayu said:
It's called beta for a reason?
Click to expand...

so right like how you fail a leve if you get DCed or the client crashes?
or the lack of a hardware mouse
or fact crafting is insanely more complex then need be?
or the fact that the interface lags
or that the patcher makes you wait to seed some unknown amount
or that the patcher uses 4 threads and doesn't respond to system calls
or that there a no plans for an AH?
this is stuff that was asked to be fixed in closed beta
and Sq-e reply "working as intended"

the game is broken and i liked XI
 
Not sure what game all the naysayers are playing, but I'm having a game. I guess they are used to WoW where it holds your hand the entire way and doesn't allow you to think for yourself. I pre-ordered my copy today and cannot wait until release. I spent 8 hours on the game today (holy shit) and want to continue playing! Fishing has been taking all my time and I enjoy it a lot just as I did in FFXI. Can't wait to try out the other gatherers and crafts.
 
Skizzy said:
Not sure what game all the naysayers are playing, but I'm having a game. I guess they are used to WoW where it holds your hand the entire way and doesn't allow you to think for yourself. I pre-ordered my copy today and cannot wait until release. I spent 8 hours on the game today (holy shit) and want to continue playing! Fishing has been taking all my time and I enjoy it a lot just as I did in FFXI. Can't wait to try out the other gatherers and crafts.
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Are you using a K&M or Gamepad?
 
Seriously, just after I create my character and get ready to enter, the servers go down. Lol my luck.
 
I am thinking of cancelling my preorder at gamestop. I am not liking most of what I read about 14..
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
Are you using a K&M or Gamepad?
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I have used both. I decided to go mainly with gamepad because it's nice to lean back and play. I feel the UI is clunky though-- that would be my complaint for this game.

Vashypooh said:
Cliff over at FFXIAH just released hardware mouse support for the game:

http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/13698/ffxiv-mouse-lag-fix/

For those who don't know him: windower.net was him. This guy goes around unfucking their software, its amazing what he pulls off.
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Nice.
 
sayu said:
It's called beta for a reason?
Click to expand...

Hah, yea right.

ScYcS said:
I laugh at those everytime i read them. It's less than a month from release. It's not gonna be much better at release. It's the same with every MMORPG. You guys always say "dude, it's beta" and then the game releases and it's the SAME SHIT as in beta.
Click to expand...

Exactly what you said! LOTRO was a lot better when it came to functionality in the beta, yet, was still pretty shitty. At release, it was basically the same as the beta, minus few bugs. Less than a month before release and it already has so many issues? Eh, I think the final version won't be better. It will throw a lot of the potential users off, threw me off! I couldn't even play! Still can't as servers are down. I had to browse the new for half hour trying to figure out how to even get it to download itself, or patches! I would have given up if it wasn't for this one youtube video I saw of the game play.
 
The UI is absolutely terrible.
The Lag is terrible.
Disconnections are frequent, cause you to fail your quests.
The are not even written directions on your quests (I liked some of the puzzle aspects of questing, for example in DAOC, you had least had a direction).
You can fail quests while trying to find them.
UI lag, combat lag, this lag, that lag, your mom lag.

The excuse "its beta" stops at the end of closed beta. Unless they announce soon that Open Beta will be extended another month, they're heading straight for disaster. I have to agree with the long post from Elios. And see this also going straight into an Asheron's Call 2 style of fail. Asherons Call 1 is still going, and doing well from what I understand.
 
Well I guess I will not be building a PC to play this then :( really sad.

All the issues everyone described is not bad except for UI Lag.

That is one thing I cannot overlook. Its the sole reason I quit AION during day 1. UI Lag is completely unacceptable.

Why is it that people cant understand that UI lag is unacceptable in 2010? I mean.. how hard is it to render menus' and shit?
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
Well I guess I will not be building a PC to play this then :( really sad.

All the issues everyone described is not bad except for UI Lag.

That is one thing I cannot overlook. Its the sole reason I quit AION during day 1. UI Lag is completely unacceptable.

Why is it that people cant understand that UI lag is unacceptable in 2010? I mean.. how hard is it to render menus' and shit?
Click to expand...

easy
the issue is all the UI is done server side then displayed client side its like working a remote PC with VNC nothing will fix this other then a total rewrite of the UI
so any action you take will take atlest a 5 sec to happen
 
Elios said:
easy
the issue is all the UI is done server side then displayed client side its like working a remote PC with VNC nothing will fix this other then a total rewrite of the UI
so any action you take will take atlest a 5 sec to happen
Click to expand...

Ridiculous and completely unacceptable.
 
Canadian in Berlin said:
The UI is absolutely terrible.
The Lag is terrible.
Disconnections are frequent, cause you to fail your quests.
The are not even written directions on your quests (I liked some of the puzzle aspects of questing, for example in DAOC, you had least had a direction).
You can fail quests while trying to find them.
UI lag, combat lag, this lag, that lag, your mom lag.

The excuse "its beta" stops at the end of closed beta. Unless they announce soon that Open Beta will be extended another month, they're heading straight for disaster. I have to agree with the long post from Elios. And see this also going straight into an Asheron's Call 2 style of fail. Asherons Call 1 is still going, and doing well from what I understand.
Click to expand...

Hey! I liked my Hive Keeper! I miss my Hive Keeper... If only they'd make Asheron's Call 3, skill-based like the first one...
 
I think Asherons Call with a graphics update, questing system improvements, some crafting changes, etc and it would be one of the best games out there again.

Best loot system ever.
The skill system IS flexible (there are "top builds", but you can have lots of fun even with a half-way gimp build).
No game ever let you explore so well without zones (yes, portals to dungeons, but just as much portals around the countryside). [how many people had guild events like noobie runs from Fort Teth, to see who could make it the furthest, or scavenger hunts that really worked].

Asherons Call was a world, rather than a theme park, and you could do your own thing in it. Player's DID have an affect!
(my server thistledown delayed the next stage in the "monthly events" as they defended the Soul Shard (I think it was) the longest from other players.
 
So servers are back up with new patches for both the boot loader and client.
It was taking forever to download so I did the usual with my bittorrent client.

The bootloader patch was 92 bytes!
 
how are you guys leveling your sub Disciple of War and Magic class jobs? after leveling my main (5 levequests), there is no levequests to level a sub job. i tried grinding, but it only gives me physical xp....

im only at the first crystal of levequests.....should i continue the story quest and travel farther before leveling another class?
 
Character models look pretty great. The environments, however, look like the very early FMVs (warcraft 1, everquest).
 
Anyone having a problem with the fishing quests where the map spot is all the way in the mountains?
 
To anyone who hasnt tried it yet. The hardware mouse hack I posted -FIXES- The mouse entirely.
 
Vashypooh said:
To anyone who hasnt tried it yet. The hardware mouse hack I posted -FIXES- The mouse entirely.
Click to expand...

If you patched your exe last night and the update won't install with "Error 20524," you need to go back to the unmodded ffxivgame.exe and then the update will work. And then, there is a new mouse fix patch for today's version. Just FYI.

Also, I can confirm that this completely fixes the mouse. Pretty amazing difference. Before I read about how ffxiv handles the mouse I thought my computer was struggling. :rolleyes:
 
What a waste of my time, bandwidth, and just about everything else. I was excited to try it, jumped through hoops to try and get it to work, in the end, very dissapointing. Lag everywhere, from graphics, to mouse, to ui, to horriblle interface, to sub par enviroments.... I really was hoping that this game would be good. But, to me, it's awful, specially for an mmo. Sucks even for being an open beta.
 
played this a few times today after finally getting a key earlier this weekend.

I am going to remember this as quite possibly the worst experience I have had with a mmo (and i've been playing mmos since everquest launched). it really feels like the entire thing was developed in a vacuum. the whole game feels like a step back from even ffxi.

I had to cancel and relaunch the updater 6 times before everything worked, the whole process took almost 24 hours. the updater has no options and turned my connection to shit. plus it can max out a cpu core for no reason. windows continuously reports the updater window is not responding on my pc as well. shit programming job by square enix on this one.

once in the game I found the character creation pretty dumbfounding. can all races pick all classes/jobs? I had no idea. I was able to make a toon that looks cool however it took *way* too many clicks. but heck, they had the time to include options to make character eyes extra huge so it must be good. at one point during character creation you need to pick a class/job specialty and see some stats, however nothing says what the stats are. also for all the text on the screen, nothing says what the classes/jobs are either. was the toon I picked a healer or dps caster? did it even matter? I have no idea.

the character selection is the first introduction to the mouse lag. now i've seen mouse lag, but this is like 'holy shit I am dragging the mouse through cement' lag. apparently this is 'fixed' in a patch which hacks the game .exe. ffxiv has no problem running with a hacked exe, so hackers and botters will go crazy with this one more than usual.

I thought the opening sequence was great. apparently you need to double click on everything to interact. I don't know if its lag or what, however this seems to fail about 75% of the time for me. or maybe everyting just takes forever. I was almost feeling good right up until the first combat. instead of just using normal mmo controls, something is jacked up with the ffxiv control scheme. you can't keyboard turn with wasd for some reason. during an actual fight the game felt clunky and unresponsive. the spell and attack icons look horrible on my pc. if you try casting a spell on an out of range enemy, nothing happens. not even a little message onscreen like 'you are out of range'. what year is this? would it have been to hard to implement some feedback for the player? (later found that the out of range messages show up in the combat log).

got to the first town... absolutely no idea what to do or who to talk to. I was ok with this and chatted around. the game feels like it needs voice acting. got to the first npc that told me what to do, screen went black for about a minute. it was loading, however the loading text was not on the screen. got my orders, ran out of the building and *foop* the game teleports me back into the building. must be lag. I try again *foop* back in the building again. no feedback on what happened. round #3 *foop* again. talked to everyone in the building, got directions, now I could leave the building, but not before another black screen loading screen.

ran around with a friend for a little bit. we did some quests, the map is horrible. the quests are horrible, nothing was clearly marked from what I could tell, I was just following along. combat remained terrible as well.

I had a harder time figuring out this ui than I did eve online. its that bad of a trainwreck. its all nested menus, small text, and shit that you are expected to know, but the game does not tell you. I never tried the crafting, however asking about it sent my friend on a tirade of swears.

the game uses a whole bunch of jargon that is complelely alien to me. this starts at the character creation and does not let up. also there are some ridiculous typos and engrish sentences still in the game. my friend found a 'hugnry wolf' so obviously they don't even spell check. I found a sentence that was just a jumble of words that had no meaning, could not figure out how to screen shot it though.

the game is apparently meant to be played with a controller however it does not even include a config for a 360 controller. what the heck buttons am I supposed to map? I have no idea, so I stuck with the keyboard.

also wtf is up with no spacebar jumping?

this went from a possible launch day purchase for me to 'f*** that game'. I own all of the major mmos (except cryptic mmos) and have spent way too much $$$ on subscription fees to the various games. I can't beleive square enix would put out shit like this in the current market. even aion is a gem of a game compared to this.

I would not be surpised if the game flops and the ps3 version never comes out. on the other hand, the ps3 version might end up being the version to have if they get the game working properly and can't fix their laggy ui mess for pc players.
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